People often adjust their diets to keep themselves healthy—but what about changing what we eat for the health of the planet? It appears that some popular meal plans, such as ketogenic and Paleolithic diets, aren’t very good for Earth or for your wellness, according to a recent study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked into the environmental impact and nutrition quality of food commodities.
Our food choices can have major consequences: What we eat contributes about a third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, when accounting for agriculture and land use, supply chain, and our dietary habits. Given food’s huge impact on climate change, it’s important that dietary patterns become more sustainable. This begins with identifying the food choices that are environmentally friendly, which is exactly what the study sought to find out.
“Given that many people are experimenting with different diets, it’s helpful to have a sense of the differences in their impacts,” says Diego Rose, study author and director of nutrition at Tulane University. “What individuals choose to eat sends signals to producers about what to produce, so individual behaviors can affect what gets produced and thus the impacts from our overall food production.”
Going vegan benefits the environment
The new research assessed the carbon footprint and quality of six popular diets, namely: vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, Paleolithic, ketogenic, and omnivore (which, basically, is the diet of everyone else). Vegans, as defined by the study, ate very little meat and dairy: less than 0.5 ounces of the former and less than 0.25 cups of the latter each day. Meanwhile, vegetarians ate less than 0.5 ounces of meat, poultry, and seafood combined; a pescatarian diet was similar to a vegetarian one, but included seafood.
[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]
Those who consumed meat but ate less than 0.5 ounces of grains and legumes per day, and less than 0.25 cups of dairy, followed the Paleo diet. People who have a keto diet eat less than 50 grams of net carbohydrates. The authors allowed minimal amounts of…